Rough rice futures at the Chicago Board of Trade ended steady on Monday, with front-month spreading the day's feature, traders said. September rice closed steady at $10.36 per hundredweight and November was unchanged at $10.68.
Speculative buying was met by farmer hedge pressure as the US rice harvest advanced. Speculative selling in September by J.P. Morgan was met by commercial buying out of MF Global.
"But the bulk of the trade 70 percent was in the September-Nov," one rice trader said. Firms were rolling their September positions ahead of the delivery period at month's end. That caused the September-November spread to narrow to 31-1/2 to 32 cents during the session, traders said.
An estimated 1,367 futures traded, up from the 689 futures that traded on Friday. After the close, the US Agriculture Department reported that 10 percent of the rice crop was harvested, near the five-year pace of 11 percent. Harvest was moving into the top Rice State of Arkansas with 1 percent of the crop off the field. Harvests were more than halfway complete in Louisiana and Texas.
Comments
Comments are closed.